At the time of [Bill] James's hiring, some observers predicted the Red Sox would be transformed into a team that relied on the computations of pasty, number-crunching geeks and completely ignored the tobacco-chewing wisdom of traditional scouts. James found this viewpoint comical. "I believe in a universe that is too complex for any of us to really understand," he says. "Each of us has an organized way of thinking about the world--a paradigm, if you will.... But the problem is the real world is vastly more complicated than the image of it we carry around in our heads."

Like every true Red Sox fan, I sorely miss the sausages that vendors used to sell outside Fenway. But here's the thing, as the old saying about hot dogs and legislation goes, we're just as happy we never saw them being made. In this startlingly well-informed look at the 2003-2005 Red Sox, Seth Mnookin shows us how the recent iterations of the Red Sox have been manufactured and it's no prettier. The era of player strikes, lockouts, and free agency has amply disabused us of the notion that baseball is a sport and not a business, but rarely has an author had the sort of access to the inner working of a team that Mr. Mnookin was granted and he uses it to show us just how the business aspects of a franchise influence what ends up on the field.

Between sabremetrics, Rotisserie, and saturation media coverage, baseball fans are probably better informed than ever before about the quality of the players in the major (and minor) leagues and are, therefore, more mystified than ever by the moves that teams make in assembling their rosters. One of the invaluable services that Mr. Mnookin performs here is to explain how considerations other than just talent end up factoring into the process. At the core of the book is a tension between the Red Sox officials who are especially focused on maximizing the revenue that the club generates -- they are generally obsessed with getting maximal media coverage and trying to win as many games as possible right away -- and those who more interested in pursuing a long range plan to rebuild the team's farm system and develop the kind of club that can contend for years. These differences lead the two sides to value players differently--with the business types wanting big names they can market and the baseball types preferring players whose merits may not be as obvious to those less familiar with statistics and intangibles. But the differences also lead them to look at the general atmosphere surrounding the club through dissimilar eyes.

Folks will likely recall the moment earlier this year when the Red Sox were playing the Yankees and had made an emergency trade to bring back Doug Mirabelli as Tim Wakefield's personal catcher. The state police escort from the airport to Fenway made not just local but national news and placed one more layer of drama on a rivalry that is already stacked pretty high. At the same time that this episode must have pleased those in management who liked dominating the news cycle and showing the fans they'd do whatever it takes to win, it fueled the type of media hysteria that general manager Theo Epstein in particular has come to believe is ultimately harmful to the team and to the front office's capacity to make clear-headed decisions.

Theo Epstein and his allies though are victims of their own success. When they took over running the club they wanted to follow the sort of plan that Gene Michael had gotten away with while George Steinbrenner was banned from the Yankees--building from within--and around the types of high on-base percentage, good fielding players that Michael and the Moneyball guys out in Oakland had gotten so much mileage out of. Many will have read Michael Lewis's book, but Buster Olney's excellent volume, The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, describes the decline of the Yankees in terms of the team's transition from the philosophy that Michael had followed to the win now mania that Steinbrenner brought back to the club as it neared the end of its run in the late 90s. While no one with the Sox is as destructive as Steinbrenner, some do see themselves as locked in a competition with him to generate publicity and win immediately. Feeding the Monster becomes a melodrama that pits those sorts against Theo and company. Eventually club president Larry Lucchino ended up being the foil for the young GM and their relationship deteriorated badly enough that Theo resigned for awhile this past off season. In Mr. Mnookin's telling it's not that Lucchino is a bad guy, just that his position in the hierarchy gave him different responsibilities and the natural rivalry between powerful men within an organization was compounded by questions about who deserved credit for successes and blame for mistakes. Exacerbating it all was the very "monster" that so concerned Epstein, a voracious and rapacious media more than willing to play up squabbles into wars. Lucchino was especially suspicious of the favorable coverage that Peter Gammons gave to Epstein and to the extent that there's a real villain in the book it's Dan Shaughnessy, of the Globe, whose column Mnookin portrays as not just loaded with errors but as little more than a venue for beating up on players, coaches, and management. It was a medium that Lucchino used to attack Epstein with nearly catastrophic results. Only the intervention of owner John Henry and some time away for Epstein has served to heal the breach.

Suffice it to say, this isn't the sort of book you'd have wanted to read when you were a kid. Ignorance of all this nonsense really can be bliss. But it is fascinating how it was the team's success that really blew many of these problems into a firestorm:

LOOKING BACK, the 2005 season was, as Henry says, a "hangover year." "You've been focusing on something, you accomplish your goal, and you say, `Now what?' " Henry says. "Human beings really thrive when they have a cause or a goal regarding something larger than themselves." Employees on every level of the team were exhausted from the energy and effort that went into winning and celebrating after the Sox's historic World Series. Throughout all this, Lucchino, exhibiting the trademark relentlessness that has made him one of the best CEOs in all of professional sports, kept pushing forward. Now, after the tumult of last year's off-season, even Lucchino seems to have a new appreciation that more is not always better.

"I realized [after the events of the 2005 off-season] that we need to slow down," he says. Before each new season, Lucchino usually comes up with new ways for the Red Sox to promote their brand or new business ventures the organization can embark on. This year, he did the opposite, drawing up an "86 list," named for the shorthand restaurants use when a dish is no longer available. "We're going to 86 the players' picnic in Fenway in September," says Lucchino. "We're going to 86 excess [Red Sox] Foundation events. . . . They're small things, but they all get to the big picture, which is that we're first and foremost a baseball team, and we've got to sort of keep our eyes on the prize."

This year, behind the scenes, Epstein and Lucchino found their working relationship was better than it had been at any point since 2003. Not long after Epstein's return, Lucchino suggested that, in order to cut down on confusion, Epstein should be the person from whom the media got their information about the team's baseball operations, and the general manager began parceling out news as he saw fit instead of eagerly feeding the baseball press's always-voracious appetite. Epstein made a commitment to integrate his staff more with the rest of the organization, and both men realized they had allowed several years worth of resentments and unspoken recriminations to fester unnecessarily.

Which is all well and good until you look at the standings today. Even as Theo and friends try to transition the team--with four rookie pitchers, a raw project in RF, and stop gaps at 3b, ss, and 2b--the Sox find themselves with the second or third best records in baseball, locked in a tight race with the Yankees, and dreams of the World Series recur. And so the Monster still demands to be fed.....